day 686: Acceptance: Part 1 - Pavement

"The good soil represents the hearts of those who truly accept God's message and produce a huge harvest - thirty, sixty, or even a hundred times as much as has been planted."

A major challenge for every organization is how well the culture can accept and integrate new talent. New people represent new ideas, new ways of thinking, experiences and practices that come from other organizations, and potentially new standards of performance and excellence that raises the bar for everyone. However, it is not unusual at all to hear the stories of people who get rejected within a few months and leave an organization scratching their heads wondering what happened. While we like to quickly tag the problem on the new employee we should also look at our culture and be sure that we don't have an acceptance problem. It may well be that we say we want to accept new talent but what is really happening is that we are not providing a soft landing or an easy place for the new person to take root. Think about it. Everyone is used to doing it their own way and ensconced in their own jobs that they don't want to give up any turf, so when the new person comes in they can't find a crack in the pavement to establish themselves. It's a worthy cultural diagnosis to understand what it is about our culture that doesn't make it easy for new people and whether or not we have created such a barrier to new people that it feels like a seed trying to find a place when planted on top of pavement.

Jesus tells us that we have an acceptance problem too. In Matthew he says, that we are the soil and he is the seed and that some of us are just like pavement and that when His message is spread to us that we just let the message sit on top of a hard footpath, that leaves the farmer's seeds getting carried away and eaten by birds. God is constantly sowing His seed for us and we have to choose and decide if we are going to accept Him. What is for sure is that if we don't soften ourselves and make room for Him that we become like pavement that doesn't allow anything in and that is not good. Today, take a moment and let's ask ourselves how open we are open to accepting His message for us. Have we opened ourselves up, or are we instead layering on another layer of pavement that doesn't allow for Him to take hold in our lives?

Reference: Matthew 13: 1-23 (New Living Testament)